The first alpha of the PECL Cairo extension I've been working on is finally out. Cairo is a 2D graphics library written in C with support for multiple output devices. The extension provides an Object Oriented API, but also includes procedural methods. This is similar to PHP's date and mysqli extensions. The reason for the dual …

I recently had the privilege of attending Zendcon 2008 in Santa Clara, CA I ended up doing four talks (two regular, one panel, and one Unconference talk) in addition to working a few hours a day. It was a lot of fun, as conferences always are, and it was great to meet my friends that I …

Microsoft has put their new SQL Server Driver (for Microsoft SQL Server 2005+ and hopefully the replacement for the aging mssql extension that uses dblib) on Codeplex under their BSDish Microsoft Public License - and YES, that is OSI approved

Production websites should not have big ugly php errors. If you leave display_errors on you are asking for trouble. Even worse is when this mistake is made on a site frequented by geeks of all flavors. PHP already has a "bad rap" for security (deserved or not).

yes, goofy name... the goal? All dependencies for PHP (and GTK so PHP-GTK runs smoothly) and PECL compiled on at least Visual Studio 2005 - in a completely transparent process where source changes and project files and built binaries are available to anyone.

For those of you who didn't know - PHP-GTK 2 finally hit a final 2.0.0 release (on leapday of all things). PHP-GTK is a wrapper around GTK, a cross platform library for creating desktop applications. With it you can write desktop apps with PHP. That means no server, just a PHP CLI, the GTK libraries, and …

MS was nice enough to grant several members of the PHP community (including me) some MSDN licenses which include the "beefed up" versions of Visual Studio which have some additional tools including testing and code coverage.

Well, here's the promised resolutions post, a little late. I actually did start it earlier, but life and kids interrupted. We'd been planning to go the the Museum of Science and Industry for almost a month now to see the Star Wars exhibit before it closed with the kids. Well in addition to that I had …

I didn't think I'd manage to wake up the last day. It had been a very late night and the pasta from the day before gave me an incredibly upset stomach. But the thought of Cory Doctorow made me get up and at it.

Day 2 ... well let's just say we all got up a little later. Day 1 I had been on Eastern time still so at 5:30 I was awake and ready to go, Day 2 meant a more normal 7am wake up. I had meant to sleep in, except that I forgot I had signed up …

It's been awhile since I've written. Summer is always a busy time with vacations and summer sports and dealing with four little ones at home. However school has started again and I'm officially "back to work".

In case you haven't noticed from the glut of other blogs announcing it - PHP-GTK2 beta has been released. A lot has been accomplished from the alpha in terms of fixed bugs, features, and other fun stuff. I've been self-volunteered to do the windows builds. Should be unzip and run on any windows above 95/98, but …

So my current project is complete (my build system is working except for the automatic part - need a new nic so it can upload without me repairing the connection...and a new libssh2 that doesn't crash on disconnect) next on my list is the "GREAT PECL WINDOWS FUN HAPPY"...err I'll stop now.